


No Future in England's Dreaming

by mechafly



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: AU, AU where Silva is not a baddie, Casual Sex, Character Study, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Shared mission, Silva is 009
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-18
Updated: 2012-11-18
Packaged: 2017-11-18 22:24:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mechafly/pseuds/mechafly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The man, taller than Bond, a grotesquely handsome man with dark eyes and improbably light hair, smiles somewhat threateningly at him. </i>
</p><p>An AU in which Silva is not handed over to the Chinese government by M and remains in MI6 to become Agent 009. M sends Bond and Silva out on a mission in Colombia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Future in England's Dreaming

Silva lives in the shadows, was born in the shadows.

His hair is white when he is a child, turns milky-blond as he grows older. His parents die when he is very young. He is recruited into MI6, because clever, unhinged orphans make the best recruits, and then he kills for a living. If Silva is entertained by the fact that the esteemed British government pays him to be a mass murderer, he certainly does not tell anyone. He does not, after all, want to give M more excuses to turn against him. Espionage, like all other games, requires finesse.

Murder has its own lyricism, its own pace and rhythm. To kill a murderer to is to bring a violent pattern of life and death to its requisite ending. Silva is the ending.

He survives the Cold War, the British handover of Hong Kong, the Gulf War; intrigue and death build up around Silva until one day, M summons him to her prim, clean office on the banks of the river Thames and gives him the title of 009.

All this means is: you have murdered in cold blood. Well done, my son. Kill more. Kill better.

But Silva – or 009, as he is now to be known, as if one codename requires substitution with another— always has pent-up adrenaline after, when the sorry business is all said and done. He is a creature of habit, and upon reporting into that same, neat office at MI6, he will always take the tube home. Sitting in its white-blind neon carriages, surrounded by kitsch-patterned upholstery and the sound of blank voices announcing every station, he will surrender himself to the exhaustion of brain and body.

One night, a woman with a silent child watches him warily from the other end of the mostly empty carriage, her face an anxious blur with the glass between them. Silva’s hands itch, and he turns slowly, slowly, to look at her. He doesn’t know what she sees: the eyes of a murderer, or the grin of a friendly stranger? Or some happy combination of both? Whether she sees Silva’s fears or her own sins reflected in his eyes, she jerks her gaze away immediately.

Adrenaline zips through Silva’s body in double-time. He goes to a bar, near his apartment, and picks up a woman. Silva prefers men, but Soho is far from his home and he’s tired tonight. The woman is a blonde, all corkscrew curves and arrogant red lips. They have athletic, brainless sex against his bedroom door, and Silva is able to sleep.

Unsatisfied in the morning, Silva wakes up and stares at the crack in the ceiling, goes into work, leaving the woman — Clarabelle, Analese, or Elisabeth, he’s not good with names — in the bed. He leaves early enough to avoid rush hour on the Underground, and adjusts his gold-plated cufflinks as he strolls into M’s office.

M is already deeply absorbed in some documents, having come in earlier than he. M, with her withered face and fierce, hawk-like eyes. Silva feels a grin tugging the corner of his lips and runs a hand through his hair. M for mummy, M for murder, M for madness. M, of course, for MI6. Silva feels his fingers itch for a gun and is only slightly impatient and terse with M, who gets to the point. “You have a mission in Colombia.”

Silva hums in enjoyment and surveys the view from M’s window as she carefully outlines the details of the mission, the locations he has to scout and the various pickup times. London is beautiful at this time of year, with autumn coming to its end and frost outlining every window pane. The streets of Vauxhall are a cool, pale grey, sliced through with the dark skeleton of winter trees and carpeted with yellow-orange-green leaves. The silent wind buffets London’s people from one stinking mouth to another. The river, a distance excited roar, a slug of slow-winding grey. The sky is the exact silver of a mirror’s surface, revealing nothing.

London is beautiful, foggy, tempting. But the view is too good, Silva thinks. He has always thought that the old MI6 headquarters were too showy, a veritable concrete palace perched above the banks of the river like a giant, inviting jewel. A part of Silva, the part that anticipates the enemy and therefore makes him such a good agent, imagines causing destruction to this very visible monument to the glory of the United Kingdom. He imagines the laughable spectacle of explosion, and bright dancing sparks. Remember, Silva might sing, the fifth of November. Or perhaps, an old favourite: _God Save the Queen_.

But no matter. No man, other than Silva of course, is clever enough to get past MI6’s security. Even with its arrogance exposed, MI6 is safe.

M finishes up her spiel and Silva turns to smile at her. M raises an affectionate eyebrow at him and tells him to stand up straight, for God’s sake, and then 007 comes in.

***

Bond notices the man at the window immediately, and feels the ghost of a motion to draw his gun. He doesn’t, of course, have a gun on him right now, but the urge is there. The man, taller than Bond, a grotesquely handsome man with dark eyes and improbably light hair, smiles somewhat threateningly at Bond. He has an even set of straight white teeth.

Bond’s sense of danger has been honed over years of missions going wrong at every interval. His sense of the danger here cranks up a few levels upon receipt of that smile.

“You’re here,” M addresses him, and Bond immediately intuits that this was planned, that he was meant to meant to meet this man, who smirks openly at him now. It must have something to do with a mission, though Bond can’t think how. He works best alone: M knows this well.

“This is 009,” M says, not moving from behind her desk or bothering with introductory remarks. M has always been severe, spare, efficient as a well-sharpened knife. Bond deduces several things. That Silva is especially dangerous is obvious: his apparently relaxed stance masks murderous tension, and the same crude relaxation in the face of both Bond’s and M’s tension is a display of the length of time he’s been playing the game.

Bond realises that 009 must have been a double-oh agent for longer than even he has, for Bond to have never met him before; that he was perhaps the original double-oh agent, the one that exists in hushed whispers in the shadows of MI6 and on whom even M is tight-lipped. It is difficult to reconcile those whispers with the cocked head and lush, inviting smile of the imposing, middle-aged man in the bright linen suit.

Also, M doesn’t bother to name Bond to 009, which means the man knows more about Bond than Bond knows about him. Bond’s sense of danger all but screams at him by this point.

“It turns out your mark and 009’s are part of the same underground organisation. They have roots in Colombia. They may even be running the country. This is serious — which is why I’m sending both of you out there tomorrow morning.”

Bond grimaces at the thought. 009 holds out his hand. “007,” he says, a thoughtful upturned smirk pointing daggers at him.

Bond shakes the proffered hand, larger than his own and just as callused. “009.”

He marches out after that, and feels the man’s smirk burning into his back.

***

"We're not so different, you and I," 009 tells Bond on the waterfront of the Colombian shoreline. The evening is settling in, mist-blue along the horizon and the vast expanse of dark, soft-focussed sea, and so, congruently, is Bond's heartache. Vesper was named for the evening, after all.

After an army’s worth of murder between the both of them, 009 ends the day by settling himself into Bond's space. Bond lives in wide dark-wood beach-house on the shorefront, spare of personal accessories and barely lit.

009, with his luminous hair and overblown physicality, swaggers about like an overgrown child, his grin never-ending and his eyes sharp. In the warmth of the night, 009 takes off his shirt and sits by Bond in loose canvas trousers and a vest, every muscle of his prodigious, golden body pouring off heat. Bond tries not to think of anything but the mission, but as ever in these last few days, 009 intrudes with a dangerous smirk.

"Are we?" Bond replies after the longest of silences.

009 laughs, a long, throaty laug, echoing out into this vast, expansive setting of low lights and humming ocean.

"Yes. I think we are. Shadows, are we not? Puppets? Playthings of dearest Mummy." 009 tilts his head back, the tempting line of his throat and bobbing Adam's apple exposed. Vulnerable. "Silva is my name, though it was not mine first, nor will it be mine last. Well, is Bond your real name?"

Bond hunches in on himself, tries to wipe his mind clean, not think of Vesper's dark, glittering eyes or the firm curve of muscle in 009’s – Silva’s – arms. "I won’t ask how you know that name. But, yes. It's the name I was born with."

"Oof," Silva grins. "Yet," he says, "They have taken it from you now. I think 007 is a realer name for you." Silva can never hold still, this fact is salient amongst many, and his thick, callused hands rub against each other, against his own thighs, against the grain of wood of the floor, testing. "Do you wish for death, Mr James Bond, Mr 007?"

"No," Bond tells him, the silence dragging along like a wounded animal.

"No?" Silva's voice turns deep and darkly amused. "What, then do you wish for?" He's looking straight at Bond and Bond's gaze comes up to meet him, inexorably. Silva is both smiling and manic, skirting an edge Bond recognises only too well. Silva comes closer, his breath, cigarette-smoky, warm on Bond's lips.

"What do you wish for?" Silva’s eyes are dark and deep when they meet Bond’s. Almost soft, like they’ve seen too much and have sympathy only for the little things now. Bond doesn't reply, doesn't react. Silva raises a hand, slowly, waiting for Bond to flinch, and Bond does not flinch.

"The thrill of.... murder, huh?" Silva cocks his chin and grins suggestively, not breaking eye contact, and grazes a hand lightly down Bond's cheek, then drifts to Bond's neck and collarbone. Bond's gaze does not waver, but Silva himself breaks the stare, distracted with undoing the first button of Bond's shirt. Silva comes closer, his face becoming a series of broken images: a flash of cheek, the line of a strong nose, the curve of full lips, a slice of teeth.

"Tell me," Silva murmurs, deep-throated, leaning in to graze Bond's jaw. Silva’s cheek is rough after a week in the field, his voice rumbling. "What do you wish for?”

"Resurrection," Bond hisses in reply, and tackles Silva: body, muscle, need, and all.

***

  
They kill an army’s worth of men, the combined forces of both their targets working against them. When all the killing that can be done for the day can be completed, Bond and Silva return to the beach-house, and Silva’s taciturn killing persona immediately melts back into the smiling phantom Bond remembers from their first meeting.

"Tell me," Silva says, flopping into Bond's lap later that evening, like an eager pet, for all that he's taller and twenty pounds heavier than Bond. Bond resists the urge to pet Silva's hair and reminds himself, instead, that this man is a deadly killer. "Tell me how you came to be called 'Bond'."

"My parents were called Bond," Bond intones flatly, and Silva makes a tiny, 'oof' sound of laughter and squirms in his lap. Bond holds him still and they struggle against each other, Silva laughing.

"Tell me about your parents," Silva murmurs.

"Nothing to tell," Bond says.

"Dead?"

"Yes."

"Of course..." Silva smirks. "Orphans make the best agents." Silva stares at him, piercingly dark-eyed, for a long moment. Then Silva decides to have mercy, in that he pulls Bond down for a kiss instead of asking more questions.

After the sex, which leaves splinters all over Bond's back and Silva tutting over the scrapes in his wrists, they lie side by side and listen to the ocean roaring outside. It sounds especially loud, or maybe that's just the blood rushing in Bond's ears.

"I..." he begins, and Silva arches silently against him. "I went back to my parents' old home in Scotland. Not long ago, after the mission in Turkey." Bond has no idea why he is telling the story, but he cannot hear SIlva's breathing any more, he is listening so hard. What does Silva hope to find of himself in Bond's past? "I burned the place to the ground. I always hated it," he confesses in a single breath, and Silva breathes again into the hollow of Bond's shoulder.

"You destroyed who you are," Silva smiles into Bond's skin. "To find yourself again, hm?"

"Found you instead, it seems," Bond says, and Silva smiles wider, his wide mouth and heavy eyes almost beautiful in the half-light.

"No. I am only your shadow." Silva whispers this like a promise into Bond's ear. “And I have been shadowing you for a very long time, my friend.” Bond falls asleep a long, long time later to the sound of Silva's muted breathing.

***

"Mummy was very bad," Silva drawls from beside him, and Bond has only just woken up and has no idea what he's talking about. "She let you come all the way here, to Colombia, to a place and a situation which you do not understand, knowing you had no idea what you were getting into. Knowing you would likely die."

There is a threat of promise in Silva's voice, and Silva tuts and tuts, like a child in the playground. Bond sits up.

"Relax, my dear 007," Silva tells him. "Relax. All this running around... it's exhausting. You need to relax. We don't need to go anywhere for hours." There is more than a hint of suggestion in Silva's silvery voice, and Bond looks at him, he finds his gaze mirrored in Silva's, whose eyes run down Bond's chest as firmly as a callused, lustful hand.

"There's always somewhere to go," Bond replies, staring out at the silent, limpid ocean.

"And someone to kill?" Silva finishes for him, his grin fixed back in place. Silva is stretched out and inviting, all hard, tanned lines and solid curves, from his full lips to the stretch of thick muscle on his hips. The sight stirs a slicing memory in Bond, the thrust of Silva's broad back and bare arse under him. Silva's fingers twitch under Bond's gaze. "Or something to fuck," Silva adds, amused.

The ocean gives Bond no response, nothing for his stare to snag onto, and he lets Silva drag him back into teeth-bared oblivion.

Sex is pure, and there's a kind of fierce delight to another person's body that's close to the thrill of sinking a bullet into another person's muscle: a comparison Bond doesn't like to dwell on. Instead he lets lust and adrenaline wipe his mind viciously clean, til his hands are leaving violent bruises on the iron-hard meat of Silva's tanned thighs, all of Silva solid as stone and fierce and unyielding, every inch of him muscled and grabbing Bond to bruise and break and caress.

Bond’s fucked men in his time, but he’s never had someone who laughs like Silva laughs, unhinged and raw with sex, the kind of laugh that accompanies a gun to the head.

Bond feels lust spike inside of him, as clear as rain and deep as a bullet. Bond wonders if this is the curse and the blessing of the double-oh agents, to kill and laugh in equal measure, and be told to kill again at the end of it all.

***

"You have some insane Jesus complex, my friend," Silva grins at him, when Bond drags himself back to the beach-house, a bullet in one arm where he was unable to wrench it out, where he is bleeding out, slow but steady. Silva sits him down and kisses him like a child and digs the bullet out with unshaking fingers. Bond is the one who shakes, his body ultimately proving traitor.

Silva patches him with scraps of frayed cloth and hums throatily over the slow process of Bond's next resurrection, considering. "Perhaps, Bond, you should learn how to die."

"Learn to die yourself," Bond grunts, teetering on the edge of passing out.

Black clouds form at the edges of Bond's vision when Silva huffs out a chuckle. "Life clings to me like a disease, I'm afraid," he murmurs, stroking Bond's hair absently.

***

Once Bond dreams of a mission in Somalia, half-forgotten now, a desert covered in corpses and corpses covered in rats, and every surface covered in cockroaches, scuttling. Bond hears them scuttling everywhere, all over him, and with slow horror he realises and he, too, is a corpse —

Bond wakes up to the hardwood floor of the beach-house and the faint blue glow of Silva's face to his right. Silva is working at his laptop, the keys clattering in quick-time. Bond breathes deeply and realises the sound of the cockroaches was only the sound of Silva at his keyboard. Gorge rises in his throat and he swallows it back down.

"What are you working on?" Bond asks, as his body slowly begins to remember it is alive.

Silva cocks his head and his frown melts into a childish smile, his eyes quick and sly. "The end to our friends in the underground movement in this country. The mechanics would make little sense to you, I am afraid," he says, regret infusing his voice. False regret, Bond reminds himself, as Silva reaches over and smoothes back Bond's sweat-matted hair from his temple. “

"James." Bond should react, because nobody has called him James for years. Not since — but he doesn't think of her, not anymore. "Go to sleep. I will watch over you." Bond's mind races — hooded eyes smiling up at him, her resignation, what he could have done to save her, all the penance he will never pay — but the sensation of Silva’s gaze on him feels familiar and, fitfully, he sleeps.

***

"There is no future, in England's dreaming,” Silva sings at some point in the night, waking Bond, who is so sick with fever that even Silva's deep melodic voice seems to come from the mouth of a devil, a devil with a melted face and one sunken eye and a black, cavernous mouth, shrieking with laughter.

***

"Look at you," Silva tuts. "Barely held together by your pills, your drink..."

"Don't forget my pathetic love of country," Bond manages to get out, and he wrenches a laugh from Silva.

"Do not get me wrong," Silva says almost fondly. "I will never doubt the patheticness of your love of this marvellous, decaying country. But to see you falling apart like this, one of Britain's finest secret agents, well... What, indeed, does it say about the state of that country you love so very much? Something rotten..." Silva hums to himself.

Bond does not manage to reply this time. The pain in his arm has been biting into every square inch of him, following the spread of fever and disease in his body, and has wiped his mind clean of responses.

Silva continues. "I wonder about you, Bond, because you do not make a good spy. Truly, you do not. You are a good murderer, and so am I, but I can force myself into the mould of a fine spy on occasion as well. Enough to be watching you, Bond, for a long time, though you have never seen me. But you are not a spy, not truly. So I wonder, why she kept you on, our dearest mummy.”

"Every country needs its hounds," Bond chokes out.

Silva seems pleased with the idea. "We are her hounds, yes? Like her fine British bulldog, hah." Bond coughs again and Silva places a calming hand on his chest.

***

"Chasing spies. England. MI6." Silva chuckles generously, as if somewhere in these words he has told an admirable, witty joke. Bond only sees the pillars that he has rebuilt his life around, and watches Silva laugh.

"Mummy was very bad to you, my friend," and Silva is gazing sidelong at Bond now. "Take the shot, is that what she said, in Turkey? Right in your ear—" Silva taps the side of Bond's face, grins wickedly. "—so that you would know that it was she who damned you! A fine business," he murmurs. "But you got out of it, didn't you?"

"Something like that," Bond mutters.

"But, my friend, how I worry for you!" Silva cries, mock-solemnly. "Mummy is very bad, and one day you will not be coming back after one of her... messy games." When Bond lays still, concentrating on breathing with full determination, Silva goes very still and considers him. "Or perhaps you will return, 007, or Mr Bond. But with a new face and a new voice..."

Silva leans over him, touches his full lips to Bond's mouth, his dark eyes filling Bond's vision. Silva seems almost sad, but Bond doesn't understand why.

***

“I will be going now,” Silva tells him, finally, when all the necessary bodies are dead and the two of them have survived. Bond feels has though Colombia has hollowed him out and left him the bullet-ringed shell of himself. And Silva looks at him with hollow eyes.

“Yes,” is all Bond says.

“Until I see you next,” Silva smiles, and leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Title is, of course, from 'God Save the Queen' by the Sex Pistols.  
> 2\. The cockroaches and laptops sequence is borrowed from maldoror_gw's excellent secret agent fic, 'The Arrangement'.


End file.
